CUCM, UCxN, VMWare and 3rd party blade centers

Cisco has the voice wiki published that has a good bit of info in it. In the Wiki, Cisco has published a standards based set of requirements for non Cisco UCS third party blade hardware for supporting virtualization of UC. It lists the expected things such as processor speed, type, amounts of memory, etc. All this is common sense.

Then it goes on to say that Cisco will only support IBM and HP, and specifically excludes all other manufacturers. As a partner, we are having issues with this. Customers don’t understand why the manufacturer enters into the standard, and the only answer we can give them is “Because Cisco said so”. That isn’t being received very well, and we have had large customers back away from UC virtualization as a result several times.

I’m not trying to force this in any particular direction. I just need an answer as to WHY the vendor even matters if we are going to use a performance based specification. I can't make sense of this, and the customers certainly aren't getting it.

Has anyone ever gotten an official or semi official answer on this matter? Every time I've asked into the various SE's I deal with, I get complete silence in response. Not trying to force this in any particular direction....just trying to understand the answer so I can communicate the requirement and explain it better.

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It matters because testing needs to be performed on all supported platforms. I am unsure of Cisco's future direction here, but your best bet would be to discuss this with your Account Team and voice your frustration, if they get enough complaints they may look into changing it as voice of the customer goes a long way.

Thanks, but if a customer is using specifications based support, Cisco specifically states that they DO NOT support the hardware and it's the customer's responsibility. It's the customer's responsibility to meet the standard.

After saying that, they then mention the specific vendor part. This combination is what creates confusion and pushback from customers.

1) Cisco rigidly specify the server make, CPU model & speed but give carte blanche on the disc & network, apart from to say: It must be supported by VMWare. Why can't they be more relaxed on the hardware like the disc & memory ?

2) The whole point of virtualisation is to abstract the hardware from the operating system/software. So why do we need this daft restriction on the hardware we can run on ? (being a total pedant, I seem to recall the point of the operating system is to abstract the hardware from the application....)

3) Using a spec based configuration for the CUCM VM, we're reserving X amount of CPU, memory & I/O for CUCM. So why do Cisco refuse to allow any other VMs to run on the same server ?

I understand and appreciate the move to support CUCM virtualised, but the way Cisco are locking things down, it's just costing us more money for no extra benefit. They seem to be doing the "letter" of virtualisation, but not the "spirit"

Actually they don't give carte blanche on the storage. In the application specific performance requirements, the number of IOPS required by the VM in specific situations is defined. This actually DOES drive down into the storage and network requirements.

As far as the other VM's (non UC), I actually understand and agree with that one. Cisco has no way of knowing what those other VM's are doing and how they would interact with available processor, memory, BUS transfer requirements, etc. UC VM's are tested for corresidency issues, and some can't live together on the same blades. No way to test this with all the different flavors of non UC VM's out there.

Again, I'm not advocating any specific position. I just need to be able to explain and justify it. The manufacturer one is what's causing me issues because I can't explain or justify the position to anyone (and Cisco said with specs based support that they do NOT support the hardware anyway).

MS are trying to push hard into the UC arena. Their pricing at the moment is hard to ignore for many organisations. Factor in that you're not forced to use a very limited range of hardware nor are you forced to pay a VMWare tax, and CUCM is even harder to justify with the finance department aginst MS Lync.

James' full notes indicate that there is an 18 month scheduled phase planned for this level of support. He doesn't state it but the implication is that after the 18 month period is ended, Cisco plans to evaluate what has been learned and I would expect they might open this up, at least some, at that point.

While MS Lync and other players may be competing agressively on pricing, my purpose in opening this thread was to address the current strategy for virtualization Cisco is following and what expectations we can have. Pricing is really a totally separate (but important) issue, that's really beyond the scope of this thread.